Cranfield University has this week launched a major new research programme designed to help businesses and policymakers meet the challenges posed by increasingly frequent extreme weather conditions.

The £1.6m Community Resilience to Extreme Weather (CREW) initiative is to be funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and will aim to develop a toolkit to help firms and public sector bodies improve resilience to extreme weather events such as floods, heat waves and storms, that are expected to become more frequent as a result of climate change.

The project, which is inviting contributions from businesses and other end users of the toolkit, will bring together researchers from 14 universities and will focus on modelling extreme weather scenarios and devising strategies for limiting the associated costs and business risks.

Initially the project is to focus on the impact on London of the increased likelihood of heat waves, drought, storms and subsidence between 2010 and 2080 and will model a wide range of economic and social impacts, including possible effects on unemployment, house prices and crime. It will also assess how the uptake of coping measures, such as household flood defences and building cooling systems, can be best implemented.

Dr. Gavin Wood, from the Natural Resources Department at Cranfield University, said that in the wake of last summer's floods in the UK there was a growing realisation that extreme weather events represent an increasingly serious social and economic risk.

He said that the project would look at a wide variety of potential risk mitigation strategies, ranging from "adapting social norms, such as taking siestas if Britain gets warmer, to full-blown engineering solutions like redesigning whole cities".

The university said that resources developed by the project would be made available online and urged interested parties to contribute to the research.